09/26/2011

Treasure From The Code Dungeon: Native Charts

If you follow my blog, then you know I've been quiet for a while. Well, I've been deep in the code dungeon, toiling away – but now I return with treasure! An awesome new feature, just for you – Native Charts. This lets you carry a regular old chart from Word, Excel, or PowerPoint out to your report. You get a perfect replica on output to Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, but we also carry them out to PDF and HTML – awesome. We're releasing this with version 11, which is coming out very soon. Here's a quick example.

Below I have a regular old report made with AutoTag, and I have the DOCX output version, and the PDF output version. This is a phone bill, and normally you just have all the ugly details, but this month the phone company decides to add a chart to it. It's the same for everyone, and it's just a couple of data points, so they just plop it right into the Word template. Run it through Windward, and voila! Adorable charts for everyone (for a small fee)!

This is cool for those of you that need these kind of charts, but it's also a precursor to something even more awesome – Interactive Charts!!! Stay tuned…